Perhaps the technical issue is with the advertising

I have started to look more at the Former Naval Person blog (NSFW), to be sure that I don't see any problems. Former Naval Person used to be my serious writing blog, but since the fall of 2006, I have increasing concentrated on pictures. Currently, I am almost exclusively posting fake Emma Watson racy pictures. I have been busy developing my graphic editing skills and have expanded beyond making ship pictures. I now am suspicious that the technical problems are caused by the advertising. What used to be called AVN Ads is now Black Label Ads.

More technical problems with Blogger?

I am wondering if we are back to experiencing technical problems with Blogger, today. Just looking at the bar chart of traffic, by hour, there are spikes when the system is working well, and deep valleys, when it is not, for the Former Naval Person blog (rather NSFW). Am I going to be forced to switch hosting? I would prefer to stick with Blogger, but the inconsistent behavior is bothersome.

This sounds very scarey...

I as reading this opinion piece at the Telegraph, about how we may be headed towards a depression that may dwarf 1929. That will be a really great companion event to a President Obama, and a Democrat House and Senate in the US. So what is a good deflation hedge?

I don't relish the prospect, but I agree with the conclusions

Bill Quick, writing at the Daily Pundit blog, says that we will end up with a President Obama, VP John Edwards, and a Democrat House and Senate. I am doubtful about the John Edwards part, but I can believe the rest. All I can say is hold onto your wallet, hide your money under your mattress, and be prepared for the economy to tank. I also would expect a big terrorist hit.

One of the latest things is that behavior that is common is made illegal

People wanting to talk on the phone while driving is a fact of life. Talking on the phone for driving is just one of many behaviors that are distracting drivers while they are driving down the road. The UK is apparently jumping on the bandwagon for banning talking on the phone for driving, and not only doing that but imposing excessive penalties. That pattern is very common in the US, and there seems to be no way to stop it. If you oppose it, you are then on the side of doing bad things. These sorts of moves are unstoppable, and they result in atrocities. I can't figure out how we will be rescued from this sort of thing. I can foresee it only getting worse. Some massive societal change would be required to restore sanity.

John Edwards

I find the fact reassuring that John Edwards really is the slimeball that he had appeared to be. The woman he was said to have had an affair with, Rielle Hunter, is six months pregnant and is in hiding, since she is so visibly pregnant. The story broke today in the National Enquirer. Given our impression of John Edwards all along, we are not surprised in the least.

RAR Files with passwords

Some anti-social person has been posting RAR files that require a password to extract them. I thought that sort fo thing warranted trying out "RAR Password Recovery", which can recover lost RAR file passwords.

IndexTools and SiteMeter

Today, there was a big jump in traffic to the Former Naval Person blog (NSFW). The peak was several hours ago. IndexTools is now consistently showing higher traffic and page view counts than SiteMeter. SiteMeter is generally said to be the way that people judge website traffic, so there is an instant from incorrect performance, if that is what we are seeing. I have spent a small amount of time studying the visit details from SiteMeter and IndexTools, and I suspect that when a browser has Javascript disabled, and possibly cookies disabled, both SiteMeter and IndexTools are not able to tell how a visitor was referred. They both think that a visitor is from a direct link, even though it is a first time visitor. Invariably, at least Javascript is disabled for that visitor.

The continuing saga of the Former Naval Person blog and web traffic

The Former Naval Person blog seems to still not be getting any Google North America traffic. I was determined to see what could be done without Google's help. Something busted loose today, and traffic is at least 50% higher than what we have recently seen. If Google would relent and send traffic our way, we would be back at two or three thousand per day. We shall see if today is fluke or a sign of things to come. As usual, IndexTools shows higher traffic than SiteMeter and both are higher than Google Analytics. In fact, Google Analytics is giving some really strange results. We seem to be getting most traffic from direct links, with Yahoo image search coming in second. Google Analytics seems to totally miss that phenomenon and that may account for the lower count.

Veterans

A phone call set me off, this afternoon. I was the last veteran of my family. I served in the navy from Ground Hog Day in 1970 up through the end of February 1981. I entered the navy as a Seaman (E-3) and left active duty as a Lieutenant (O-3). I picked up LCDR in the reserves. My younger brother is a Viet Nam veteran. As an 18-year old, he went to Viet Nam in 1968, in time for the Tet Offensive. He was in the north at the time. He stayed for 17 months, with a break after 11 months. He was a Marine and was in artillery (105mm howitzers). My father enlisted in the navy on December 8, 1941 and served through the end of the war. He was in Leyte Gulf when the war ended, as a 2nd Class Signalman. Just like the Eastern Front, they fired off all their pyrotechnics to celebrate the end of the war. Both my uncles (husbands of my mothers two sisters) also served. One was a soldier and pushed a typewriter. My other uncle was a Marine and was wounded at Guadacanal. Both my grandfathers were in the army in 1918. My father's father served in France, where he was gassed and concussed. He was with the engineer battalion formed from the Michigan National Guard as part of the 32nd Infantry Division. My mother's father never went overseas. Both of my grandfathers had their way paid to the University of Michigan, where they received engineering degrees. My father went to the University of Michigan on the GI Bill and got his BA in Art and had started on an MA degree. He tired of school and wanted to work, so he bailed. The navy paid for my BSEE from Purdue, while I was on active duty and I used my GI Bill benefits to pay for my MS degree in Computer Science. A guy I worked with in Minnesota saw his daughter enlist in the army after September 11th. That was a common thing for parents, as young people in our present day are just as patriotic and want to fight our enemy, just as my father, uncles, and grandfathers did. We are in a war, not of our making. Our Pearl Harbor happened on the morning of September 11th, 2001. We lost 3,000 people on that morning. Most in the World Trade Center, but also at the Pentagon and in the field in Pennsylvania. We had heroes, just as they had at Pearl Harbor. I thought about the fact that my wife's uncle was working as a civilian aviation machinist at Ford Island in December 1941. Her cousin was not born yet, but her aunt and uncle lived in Honolulu. After the attack, my wife's uncle went onto the base and worked to help recover. That war lasted less than four years, but our war already has lasted longer than that. How long will we be at war? There are battles yet to be fought and enemies yet to be defeated. For better or worse, you are getting my unedited stream of consciousness.

Jeanne Assam

This is another case where someone with a gun stopped a terrible crime in progress. In this case, a woman with a gun, Jeanne Assam, shot Matthew Murray. She was a volunteer security guard at the New Life Church. The "guards" were all parishoners, some of whom were ared as was Jeanne. She had suggested having guards after hearing of the shootings at Arvada, an hour to the north, earlier in the day.

I want my IE6 back!

I foolishly upgraded to IE7 and it is especially bad. In fact, it almost doesn't work on my machine, which has Windows XP Professional and many applications installed. I wish I still have IE6. I use Firefox as my main browser, but some sites, such as the Zogby poll, work best with IE6. (Actually, IE7 is working acceptably on my other machine, the one with Windows XP Home and fewer applications installed).

Former Naval Person traffic tracking

Needless to say, I am pleased that SiteMeter is showing a higher level of traffic for the Former Naval Person blog. I imagine that when I made the transition to the new stylem Blogger template, I changed the SiteMeter script to a version that doesn't work with browsers that have Javascript disabled. Now, instead of SiteMeter being way below IndexTools, IndexTools has been way below SiteMeter. I have opened a support ticket with IndexTools, pointing out the current issue. There was an outage today, and afterwards, traffic was shown to be higher, although still not at the levels shown by SiteMeter. In case you had not picked up on this, Bloggers are always interested in getting accurate traffic counts. There has long been a concern that the standard tracking with SiteMeter might undercount the real traffic.